doing devil’s advocate here, because it does look like a nightmare.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
a big tech device/platform designed and algorithmically optimized to hit/increase corporate metrics with small kids as the subjects... hard to imagine anything more dystopian
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
Do notice that the big all powerful computer doesn't come with games and it's way more complicated to use, challenging the kid from the get-go.
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
Maybe desktop computers? But touch computers have been designed to be dead simple to use, I don't think jobs had uniquely designed the iphone to be simple enough for a child to use, but he did design it to be usable by people from other countries and cultures with no previous training, children being able to use these touch devices is at least a side effect.
I've personally tried to do use a tablet in a productive way for the child, and it's all about the apps rather than the tablet itself. Tablets for children (Android knockoffs, essentially) provide what's needed, that is, account controls.
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
A loaded question and I feel like people here including yourself are criticizing from the sidelines. Essentially the old "OMG you let your kid play on the phone!!! what a terrible parent!!!!". Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
My wife and I sent our son to a remote "boarding school" type school near where we live in Japan. No phones or electronics beyond an mp3 player are allowed. We're so lucky it is cheap and readily available here.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
Did you read the article? It clearly references many research projects which show detrimental behaviour, bad temper, and poor attention spans undeniably linked to screen time in under 6s.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
> The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points.
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phone. Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
My wife and I are working parents. This is nightmarish. We know screen kids and they are not good around other people.
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
> Although this isn't a phone, it's a device designed for kids with hopefully some apps that have a little more educational value than the typical phone apps.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy). But this is besides the point.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
Honestly, I respect different approaches for disabled kids. Must be very hard, I can't even imagine.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
whenever I see a little kid with his head buried in a tablet / smartphone in a public place or when visting relatives / friends I start to wonder if this is what I looked like to my parents when I spent more than 1 hour playing on the family computer.
> This is no different to our parents generation that used to tell us to stop watching TV or get off the games console (like a Gameboy).
It's improved. When cell phones first came out, I kept getting run into by teenagers in stores and on sidewalks who couldn't both use their phone and navigate the world. That skill is now generally present and it's no longer a problem.
IMO even parents who use digital devices to pacify their children know they are making bad choices, but just choose to anyway out of convenience. This choice mirrors a lot which adults have to make these days, and fighting convenience requires strong will and sticking to principles. This is not something which comes naturally or easily to humans unfortunately.
It's not as if the kids who get the digital pacifiers are well behaved.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
It's also a slippery slope. And a function of our society. We went in with the best of intentions and I'm now letting my toddlers watch 30 or 40 minutes of TV a day. It started with one quick work meeting that I couldn't reschedule or skip. Then they started asking for it, demanding it really. It has taken incredibly strong will to limit their watching to 30 or 40 minutes in the early morning.
My kids liked to watch Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street (before the age of YouTube). They had to catch it when it was on and when it was over, that was it. They had to go find something else to do. The scarcity made my job as parent a lot easier.
It’s a double edged sword to be able to watch things whenever.
I downloaded every episode of Mr. Rogers and serve them from Plex. On one hand it does create moments where you have to limit your kids and that creates an outsized emotional response, but it also allows me the chance to watch the episodes too (as they aren’t on only at “kid show” times).
I appreciate the chance to show interest in something that they are interested in.
It's entirely possible, from a technical perspective, to have the computer play a specific file at a specific time. They're kids, they don't know how things work (yet!) If you want Friday at 6pm to be Mr Wizard hour on the TV, and then lie to them and have it not be available any other time, have at it!
Of course it is possible, but I prefer to keep it simple. For example, on Saturdays we watch one episode of the Star Trek: The Animated Series. It’s a fun tradition, and it’s by choice.
Also, as I have watched so many Mr Rogers episodes I know that sometimes you have to find ways to deal with the mad that you feel[0], so I don’t mind helping work through emotions when we don’t agree that it’s time to stop.
Setting boundaries is also part of parenting, is "the crack machine isn't despencing right now" better or worse then "time to take a break from the crack machine" I know putting a foot down can be hard, but I'd argue that it's good to practice on low stakes stuff like a show.
I’ve built Tellybox to specifically control what and how long my kids can watch anything.
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
I dont have kids (but may in the future) and one thing I'd like to do before then is get a NAS /plex server and build a kid friendly UI on top of it to keep them off of youtube/netflix/fire tv and greatly limit the content available to them to high quality vetted stuff. Acquiring the content for the server may be its own project in and of itself I admit. I also want to do this for myself too, but I especially want it should I have kids. I'm excited by some of the recent examples of hacking smart TVs too, which seems complimentary.
I just threw infuse logged in as "kids" to Jellyfin which has curated kids stuff - and it's all tied to a custom home assistant timer profile that turns jellyfin access off at a particular time; there's a "door lock" in HomeKit that can be used to extent TV time past the normal cutoff if a parent decides, but since it's a door lock "hey Siri" can lock it, but not unlock it.
You don't even have to do it before you have children. You can wait until they are six or so and have the autonomy to pick what they want to watch (under your guidance). For children younger than that, you pick what they watch and when they watch it. Every time.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
Kindles were the only devices that had a fully locked on ecosystem, yet no device lockin on the parent side (no need to keep an up to date iPhone just for the parental controls for instance)
Nowadays I think I wouldn't mind audio and video, especially audiobooks and channels like those on Nebula. YouTube is a cesspool while also hosting the most interesting content, running something like Newpipe on a kid's tablet with specific channels locked on would also interesting IMHO.
> addictive games
The main issue for me is the lack of management options. ScreenTime is half-assed, what we have on Nintendo's Switch is a bit better, I'd actually spend time to deal with all the settings and rule system if it was available in a very granular way. We're already spending the same amount looking after other stuff.
> Note: Eligible families were recruited primarily through paid social media advertisement (83%) as well as other online sources (6%) and word-of-mouth/other (11%).
So most of this experiment was done with families who click ads on Facebook/Instagram. The results are relevant for that specific public, but tougher to expand to other families and environments.
That's one specific study, but I really read a lot, and this kind of bias is common. Perhaps because they need families that are stressed about screen time in the first place ?
Lol, here in Germany libraries are more like immigrant support centers (at least that's what they focus on - gotta try to get the socially disadvantaged to read). And white middle class families with kids.
Public libraries were for me an extremely formative experience with a ton of memories, I wish my kid could enjoy the similar moments.
The reality of it though: librarians have their lives and can't man libraries 24/7. Scheduling regular visits is fine if the kid has a reading routine,
basically the "1 book a week" kind of quota.
I know some people do it, to my family it's a lot easier to me to search together online the very moment an interest is expressed, buy it on the spot and the kid can start reading immediately. There's no discipline, but it also makes books and documentaries a lot more familiar and casual.
Some of them think its safe, others think the risk is overblown, and a lot just don't want to deal with their kid having a shit fit.
In the UK, unless you are adopting a kid with needs, you will not get any parenting training. so you're on your own on how to deal with children. TV was safe when I was a kid, and younger parents who grew up with digital TV also had safe watching, why would youtube kids be any different?
With my kids (and yes this is a boast, I'm middle class, this is how we assert dominance) I was lucky enough to be able to enforce time limits of TV/netflix etc. They also aren't allowed youtube on their own, so never got onto the conversion ladder from crap to exploitative crap.
crucially they don't have tablets/phones whilst bored. TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Parental training has not been the norm in most societies and most times. The problem in the modern west is that people lack the community and family support that helps parents. This combined with other things (lack of time with two parents working full time out of the house being usual, parental addiction to devices, etc).
> TV was safe when I was a kid,
Safe in some ways, but still harmful. it was passive and a substitute for things that helped you develop. A lot of parents (mine included) limited TV for just this reason.
> TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Exactly this - one of the things I had in mind with regard to TV being harmful. Even in the days when we had three or four broadcast channels and that was it!
> I'm middle class
Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
I think we broadly agree. I wasn't precise in what I meant by parental training. As you pointed out, in modern british cities, outside of the immigrant communities, parental duties are rarely communal. Moreover they are happening later and as you point out, away from family and other support groups.
This is a change that has accelerated in the last 25 years, and we do all need to do something about it. I suspect the first step is making housing mor affordable, which means building more homes. (both "private" and social, [council housing] we can't just cater to one part of the market.)
> Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
Somebody should study whether giving a smart device to a toddler increases their chances of getting ADHD diagnosis and medication at later age. Probably the answer is yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
Yes, the causes are mainly genetic, but you can't diagnose it based on genetics, instead it's diagnosed based on symptoms. So if environmental factors (like giving toddler a tablet) worsen it already in childhood, the chances of getting ADHD diagnosis increases, in particular for milder cases. It's impossible to fully know what is caused by genetics, and what is caused by environment.
There is also something called "Attention Deficit Trait", which is case of ADHD like symptoms where the cause is not in genetics, but solely in environmental factors. While real ADHD is largely in genetics, I fully believe any individual can mess up their dopamine system by spending enough time browsing social media on their smartphone.
Most people who get ADHD diagnosis do have the condition (assuming proper diagnosis procedures were followed), but in a different environment it could probably be much less of an issue for many.
The drop-proof design is good selling point even for adults. Few phones and tablets come that rugged from the factory. The long battery life/playback time too. Might see some use among adults if wasn't stuck with the $9/month subscription.
I agree for age of 3-6 years, but until age 14 is ridiculous.
Not all devices are equally bad.
I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.
Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).
The difference there is that you had a difficult, meaningful, constructive experience instead of one designed to just addict you. Even though both were running on von Neumann machines.
I think there is a meaningful difference between an Intel 486 and a portable device like a tablet, especially if the former is not connected to the internet (or is connected to the internet as it was circa 1995). I think it could be fine and even beneficial to give a kid a desktop computer to write games using QuickBasic, and at the same time very harmful to give them a tablet.
Another thing to blame on the billionaires then. Soon they will become like gods, feared and blamed for intentionally causing plagues and famines when people dont appease them enough.
It's kind of gross that people think the screens for kids phenomenon is "avoid parenting" — a two working parent household has very little time for anything and it's incredibly stressful (good luck if you're a single parent).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
cool, so why exactly are people saying that this cant happen anymore and parents need to give screens to their kids in order to have enough time to work? Kids dont roam anymore becasue they have screens, not the other way around.
Nope, I would strongly disagree — kids don't roam anymore and screens fill the time at home, but the social fabric of the US has been collapsing long before smartphones and arguably even the popularity of the internet. Devices have perhaps accelerated the problem, but they're far from the cause.
The dual-income household expectation and collapsing middle-class (lost share of productivity) would be the most to blame from my perspective... there's also a major daycare shortage because of this, the lifestyle changed and surrounding factors haven't caught up. There are kids regularly staying at after school programs until 6pm because parents are working and no one wants kids wandering around on their own, even in teen years. My local mall has banned kids under 18 unsupervised as yet another example.
They smacked their children. Not sure if we want to go there.
If a kid made a scene in public back in 1950, they would be smacked. In fact, in many countries in the world, people are still pro-smacking. Teachers can smack the kids with no moral issue.
Mental health for kids before 2000 was much worse... to be generous to the older generations.
People just continued on with their chores and let their kids run about. Kids were way less supervised and were allowed to be on their own. As another poster said, physical punishment was also very common.
I guess thats why we are also now seeing epidemics of young people that cant cope with independent modern life without constant support, and massive rises in mental health issues of young adults.
I'd say the main reason for this is how much more complex life has become. In the past basic life for a normal person was quite simple. Now it requires much more from a person to handle the basic necessities in life.
I fully disagree with that. You used to have to get up and go out and find everything in the world. Now you can just sit on your sofa and have everything come to you, including your job.
My kids are far from perfect angels, but they do just fine on a 5 hour flight with some colouring books, a small container of legos (with pieces pre-chosen to be ones we're okay with losing), and then the excitement of getting to order ANY drink they want (from their point of view).
I have 3 kids and it has dramatically changed my world view. They are all very different, despite being raised exactly the same. 1 or maybe 2 would do fine for 5 hours with colouring books and legos. The third absolutely would not. We still limit screen time to almost nothing so I'm not necessarily arguing with your overall point. But my honest reaction to comments like this or, worse, from people who aren't parents, is you really don't know. I'm not a single parent but, yea, imagine raising multiple kids who aren't as easy as yours on your own.
This is the reality of parenting. I didn't believe it in my 20s when a manager at my company talked to me about this phenomenon, and then I parented more than one kid. It was a real eye-opener to live through what had only been an intellectual exeercise before. For a bunch of kids, the standard stuff works. Then there's the rest.
Not sure why you’re getting so strongly downvoted. The travel situations are the ones I find the most reasonable for tablet use. It’s definitely possible to keep a kid occupied for a 5 hour plane ride without a tablet but it takes work. Very few adults can raw-dog a 5 hour plane ride themselves, ffs. I may judge other parents for allowing tablet use in other situations, but not on an airplane.
Unfortunately "Sorry I'm an hour late, I had to sit at the side of the road until my kid stopped crying" isn't going to fly at work pretty much anywhere.
So, they screamed for 30 minutes. They're kids. I'm not gonna give my 4 or 6 year-old something that's gonna take a hatchet to their attention span just because they're doing a thing that's completely normal for that age.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
I can't imagine having to raise kids with both parents working. Good on you and your partner for holding the line on screen time in spite of the difficulty.
> That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life
Such a great attitude. Wish everyone saw it this way. I've tanked a few car rides like this but I'll do it a hundred more times before I throw a pacifier at my kids.
I have a rule for gifts for my kids: no screens. Toys are so much more interesting than screens. They'll prob end up staring at screens their whole lives for work.
They might be because they don't get to build the muscle around how to control themselves in front of addictive software. It's an important skill to develop.
I very much am, feel free to engage! :) I was genuinely interested in how you made that leap, or we could talk about how parents navigate the logistics of balancing an emphasis on books vs. exposing them to challenging scenarios, or whathaveyou. Had you maybe discussed how you made that leap when I asked, perhaps we'd be having that conversation right now. ;)
The managerial class feels very strongly that letting small children use tablets in any capacity is avoiding parenting, but putting infants in paid childcare is a natural part of the social order.
No we don't, and propagating this myth is damaging to people suffering that need that medication.
Many medications behave extremely differently under different dosages, delivery methods and variants.
To quote an ex of mine who was a school psychiatrist, "oh, ADHD meds are addictive are they? I wish someone would tell that to my kids who keep on forgetting to take them."
I was thinking about what a great commentary Toy Story 5 was on this topic. I'm surprised Amazon didn't call their tablet a Lily Pad.
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on on current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
I can see how a tablet optimized for logic puzzles, e-books, drawing etc. could be highly beneficial but these adverts seem focused on the child's relationship with the tablet. I think an art/puzzle machine is a much healthier starting point than an everything machine.
Get kids an old computer. They prefer something big they can see, with switches that make a resounding clunk, and drives that make clanking noises.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
A toddler needs manipulative toys to develop patience and motor control. Blocks to stack, puzzles to fit together, balls to throw and catch, books with pages to turn. Nothing electronic at all.
...lots of unstructured play I surely did have with my slow as molasses bloated Pentium 4 machine with XP and no internet in my childhood. Developed a LOT of patience when downloading stuff from the Net (on 256Kbps, no less!) on one PC and moving it over to my machine.
256 whole kilobits per second? Talk about instant gratification. You kids and your fancy broadband connections, back in my day all we got was dial-up at 56k and we liked it!
... which gets ever more hard to provide, sadly. Many people can't really afford an appropriately sized home - but in contrast to "earlier" times, can't send the kids outdoors as a replacement either as they're unsafe due to car-centric culture, the death of third spaces and, in the US, gun and other violence.
I agree. As they get older there is more room for electronic stuff and it can have benefits. I think the first apps my kids used were things like GCompris.
Re: development - I've started shooting film for the first time recently and have been developing B&W film in my kitchen using Caffenol, a mixture of instant coffee, washing powder, and vitamin C tablets, all things you can get at the grocery store. https://www.caffenol.org/recipes/ (I've been using the standard "delta" recipe)
I 3D printed a film development tank, and bought some "glassware" at a thrift shop to mix things up.
You still technically need a real fixer, but B&W fixer isn't all that bad compared to the whole slew of chemicals needed for color processing. The only thing I've bought for the whole process was some powdered fixer from a photo store.
Here's some of the shots off my first roll (Ilford HP5 shot on an Olympus Pen EE2) https://postimg.cc/gallery/fL5HvXV this was just using a film scanning phone app, but I've since gotten a real film scanner which gives much better contrast, I just don't have any of those on my work computer.
No, camera first helps teach them how to observe their surroundings and look for good potential photos in what they see. It’s also interesting to see photos from a child’s perspective on what they find interesting. When they get a feel for that they can move on to drawing and painting stuff from their own mind.
I wanted a PC so bad I used to "wire up" a pocket calculator to a TV with a piece of string and pretend it was a keyboard and the TV was the monitor. My parents didn't trust me with a "real PC" so they got me a Famicom clone that at least had a real keyboard. What they didn't know was it also had BASIC, and thus my fate was sealed.
You just unlocked memories I have of playing with a typewriter as a kid. A big big clunky one. Hitting those keys would be so satisfying. I didn't have an ink ribbon, so no actual typing happened, just hitting those big ass keys.
I watched a colleague's kid play a game on his iPhone. It was on airplane mode. But every so often a window would pop up trying to show an ad, and the kid would hand it to his dad, asking dad to "fix" it.
A pre-millennial computing experience would have the benefit of not having that sort of bullshit. For the patience-building experience it could be real floppies, but putting the games in an emulator is also an option. I guess Windows 11's "Install Copilot Edge OneDrive 365? [Yes/Maybe later]" popups means you'll have to go Linux...
My kids started with desktops, and in family areas of the house. I did not go as far as getting something from the 1980s or teaching them to use the command line as toddlers, but they were second hand desktops running Linux.
It was easier with the older one as phones and tablets were not as pervasive so I can understand it has become harder to do.
I also thing another issue is that parents are also addicted to devices so pay less attention to children. its not the only issue, but it makes it worse. It was epitomised for me by a woman who, when her son refused to put down his tablet on a train trip, took a photo of him on it and posted it to FB for advice.
Yep, this is what we did. Both my kids are computer kids now and look down (nicely) on the "iPad kids".
The Amazon product is fine. It's really a question of how often they use it, and how early. I agree that any screens before 2 risks screwing up a human's idea of what's real.
Using gen ai so I have been bite size mini games for my son to learn letters and numbers. Today he said skeletons are just pretend given we’ve been walking around looking at Halloween decorations. So I’ve had to explain that skeletons are real and they’re inside all of us. So in these mini games, now I’ve added a 3-D rendering of the body for kids to show the skeleton and muscles and what a human body looks like. And I was able to walk them through it and explain it to him and he’s been very excited about the fact that now there’s this he understands there’s a skeleton inside of him. All that is to say, I think curated parent led experiences with technology are still a great way to teach, and we can’t just hand them an iPad and say here’s some shows to calm you down
I think that once parents become the OS devs specifically for their own children (or at least app devs) the tablet becomes less like a pacifier and more like a ball game between the toddler and parent, as each throws new stuff (metaphorically) at the other.
This is nice that you're walking them through it but I wonder why you'd need a tablet in the first place, then? It's better to sit with them in front of a monitor with the proper posture and viewing position.
> “Kids want a real tablet, not a toy,” the Jeff Bezos-founded company said in a press release announcing its Amazon Kids Tablets.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those who do not. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
I’m with you 100% on obsessively blocking ads. I cringe whenever I accidentally see one in someone else’s house. They’re just so transparently playing on our insecurities…keep that particular mind virus away from me. I buy as little as possible and I’m quite content with it, thank you very much.
Screens are horrible. I am absolutely not on the side of screens in general and Amazon deserves this attack. But please don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting. You really don't know. Really.
> don't comment to complain about bad parenting if you haven't had kids or had 1 or 2 neuro typical, easy kids and a wife who did most of the parenting
So I'm allowed to complain, and then some :). Screens are horrible. But kids don't raise themselves no matter how "easy" they are. The parents have to make unpopular decisions that the kids will benefit from and maybe even understand when they're older. Those decisions will suck the life out of you because the child "hates" you for it, and you have to fill the void with something else that takes more parental effort. Sometimes maybe it's impossible to avoid "the screen" because of some special family situation. But at "3+" these are exceptional situations, not the rule, don't treat them like the baseline.
The consequences of addiction from such a young age to screens (or sugar, junk food and every other mistake parents make to make their lives easier in the moment) are documented and lifelong. As a parent you won't escape them, you'll live them through your child's life. Might as well take the hit for them now, even if it costs you.
We've had an absolutely-zero-screens policy for our almost-3-year-old (and will have the same for his baby sister) and I think it's made things much easier than if he had limited access. It's simply Not An Option, so we as parents and he as a child manage to find other interesting things to do. Currently he's really into listening to music on a 35-year-old Fisher Price cassette player, scooting a toy garbage truck around, and thumbing through books.
Plane rides are difficult (and he's had many) but so far we have gotten through them with patience, lots of snacks, and a new toy or two.
Maybe we're spoiled, but when I tell my daughter she's not allowed the screen now, she complains but eventually she'll start doing something else.
Yeah sometimes this turns into an emotional outburst. So what? She's a toddler sometimes the emotional outburst just happens because the sofa looked at her wrong.
It seems to make the special cases where she is allowed the screen for longer (long car/van rides for example) work better.
The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
> The discourse on tablets for kids tends to degenerate into a very judgy, black-and-white debate of so-called “tablet kids” vs… not, which I find really reductive.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
>Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Christ, at least let the kid think about it on his own and ask questions later! Don't know about your kid, but I don't know ANY person, at any age, that would not feel like they're enduring an insufferable school class with behaviour like this.
> Christ, at least let the kid think about it on his own and ask questions later! Don't know about your kid, but I don't know ANY person, at any age, that would not feel like they're enduring an insufferable school class with behaviour like this.
Depends on the age of the kid. Started doing this when my son was 3, it helped him learn lots of words for different emotions and it helped him learn to use words to describe other's emotions.
Now that he is older I do this less, it depends on what we are watching though.
Active listening to stories, and actively engaging with media, is a learned skill. It isn't automatic.
I read to him together, a lot, and he'll stop and ask me questions about what is happening in the book. When I'm reading to him and other kids at the same time, other kids will notice him asking questions and then realize they can also ask questions, and pretty soon I am answering more and more questions about what is going on.
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[ 0.26 ms ] story [ 76.5 ms ] threadI have nothing else to say rn.
IF my kids were to have access to a tablet, I would prefer it be a tablet specifically desgined for kids, rather than a commodity all powerful generic computing device and OS
maybe it'll help us raise good docile consumers and workers tho /s
And I do respect the disclaimer, but lately my experience tells me the devil's advocates help the devil (and I'm an atheist!)
Also they have to learn to use a mouse and a keyboard to do that. You probably forgot how hard it was to learn to use both. Double clicking was really hard for me as a kid
Problem is: there is a limited amount of apps that are genuinely fun and educative. If Amazon wanted really to do something truly educative for children, they'd build a whole market for it, the marketese I see in the article doesn't support that.
What about if I just handed my kid a linux machine and put a 30 min cap on YouTube time via the router. (tiktok etc all just banned)
That might go some way to reproducing the kind of friction we experienced growing up with PCs...
Edit could even start with some on-device parenting apps. What about a local LLM powered to classify videos as slop/educational. More power to them if they figure out how to disable it (I'll add more restrictions after a brief honeymoon period)
The talk in this thread indicates absolutely no empathy for dual working parents and just repeats tired talking points. If anyone here looks back on their own childhood perhaps they actually had similar freedoms? Hell i used to play the Apple 2 obsessively from a very young age. I credit it as formative in a positive way.
You can argue that if you're both working and no one has 100% time to dedicate to raising the child they shouldn't have children but that argument leads to plummeting birth rates.
I say all of this as someone who doesn't have kids but I have at least some sense of how freaking hard it is and in the grand scheme of things a tablet designed for kids isn't the worst thing.
Tell me why an alternative that's at least better than a phone is so bad? If you want to argue a phone or any such device that keeps kids occupied for some time is unacceptable i think you're waaaaay out of touch.
The school's policy isn't necessarily from a "phones bad mmmkay?" perspective, but from a "our ancestors had to figure stuff out for themselves, let's foster that" perspective.
This is still a terrible idea.
I think it's better to give them a movie rather than an algorithmic feed.
My kids get no more than 10m of tablet time a day each. Both of us are working full time. When they ask for more I point them to their toys/books/etc, or play with them.
So, being dual working doesn’t mean you have to allow your kids to have lots of screen time.
“m” means “meters”.
shut it
you know what he meant, go stuff your pedantry back on Reddit
I am a dual working parent. We dont own a tablet and our kids never get handed phone. Your Apple 2 days were very different to the algorithms and feeds of today. Giving a kid a phone loaded up with the Youtube Kids app is literally like feeding them crack.
I am sure there are exceptions, but if you are a duo working parents, you don't have time to dig through children apps to figure out which are good.
Overall tv in common space is better (occasionally), you can keep an eye on what the kid is watching and how is affecting their behavior.
You realize when they are done watching tv way earlier than they are (if ever)
Our kids use tech - Nintendo Switch, tv, raspberry pis, and yes, even a tablet for things like train or plane rides. But they absolutely did not get this as a toddler. Yes we were tired. Yes it was hard. Parenting isn't easy.
The dual working parents part is a red herring.
Single working parent families were still busy as hell in many circumstances. Even with a single kid there has always been a social push to control (historically)women's time and make them try hard to be good wives/mothers. I include socializing and engaging with their community to be part of it.
Nobody ever had the time or energy to watch after a kid 24/7 while dealing chores, paperwork, the rest of the family etc.
HAHAHA no its not. Amazon Kids+ is an endless stream of product tie in mass market commercial junk content.
The quality has gone down over time (amazingly), curation doesn't exist, and discoverability of the little bit of good content that is there is pretty much impossible.
I feel it's great, but then I use Google Kids on the Fire, because Amazon's app is junk in comparison.
And also, my kid is (disabled) autistic and non verbal and this keeps them calm and happy.
So yes it's a great idea.
Other than that, movies and games are less destructive than algorithmic feeds, especially short form video. It is preferable to move outside or read a book. But I think we're comparing vegetables to candy to cigarettes.
Yeah, except for the part where it’s engineered to be as addictive as physiologically possible, it’s exactly the same!
Yeah, but they were right though?
It's improved. When cell phones first came out, I kept getting run into by teenagers in stores and on sidewalks who couldn't both use their phone and navigate the world. That skill is now generally present and it's no longer a problem.
Usually my kids are sitting quietly at the table and playing with their little cars or whatever while some kid is melting down that he ran out of roblox or his game isn't working.
I've literally seen kids that are 9 or 10 act this way in public! Like little babies!
I downloaded every episode of Mr. Rogers and serve them from Plex. On one hand it does create moments where you have to limit your kids and that creates an outsized emotional response, but it also allows me the chance to watch the episodes too (as they aren’t on only at “kid show” times).
I appreciate the chance to show interest in something that they are interested in.
Also, as I have watched so many Mr Rogers episodes I know that sometimes you have to find ways to deal with the mad that you feel[0], so I don’t mind helping work through emotions when we don’t agree that it’s time to stop.
0: https://www.misterrogers.org/videos/what-to-you-do-with-the-...
It has a visual indicator (sun going down) that tells them how long they have remaining and that works quite well to remove any discussions (well… screaming and shouting)
https://github.com/sandermvanvliet/tellybox
As others have said in adjacent threads, kids are hard, every situation is different.
Do start hoarding the better shows and series you know.
As one of them, no, not really.
I looked hard into the question but all the litterature I got was a mix of "I'll give you candy if you do X" experiments that beg the obvious "what if the kid doesn't want the candy for whatever reason ?", including their mood while doing the experiment. And this goes on for every detail of the experiments.
And the rest was philosophical and hypothetical "it's not like the olden days" style of conservatism, mixed with "this time it's different" to try to barrage criticism.
Testing on kids is just hard, so coming up with good experiments is in itself a PITA. I wish people would recognize that and take the research with shovels of salt (and I don't see misleading research as better than nothing).
Buying a kindle for my kid has been a decision that still pays dividends, I would have kicked myself if I refused it on social pressure.
Nowadays I think I wouldn't mind audio and video, especially audiobooks and channels like those on Nebula. YouTube is a cesspool while also hosting the most interesting content, running something like Newpipe on a kid's tablet with specific channels locked on would also interesting IMHO.
> addictive games
The main issue for me is the lack of management options. ScreenTime is half-assed, what we have on Nintendo's Switch is a bit better, I'd actually spend time to deal with all the settings and rule system if it was available in a very granular way. We're already spending the same amount looking after other stuff.
Fair enough. I guess ignoring large swathes of industry research and government warnings must be a good tradeoff for an easier life.
The first result that isn't a guideline or call to action when I search "preschool children screen time research"
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074937972...
On the recruitment:
> Note: Eligible families were recruited primarily through paid social media advertisement (83%) as well as other online sources (6%) and word-of-mouth/other (11%).
So most of this experiment was done with families who click ads on Facebook/Instagram. The results are relevant for that specific public, but tougher to expand to other families and environments.
That's one specific study, but I really read a lot, and this kind of bias is common. Perhaps because they need families that are stressed about screen time in the first place ?
I have not come across any research saying ebook readers are bad. They are very different from general purpose tablets.
My local library is almost as much a homeless support center as a library, it's its own cultural experience, but we still go.
The reality of it though: librarians have their lives and can't man libraries 24/7. Scheduling regular visits is fine if the kid has a reading routine, basically the "1 book a week" kind of quota.
I know some people do it, to my family it's a lot easier to me to search together online the very moment an interest is expressed, buy it on the spot and the kid can start reading immediately. There's no discipline, but it also makes books and documentaries a lot more familiar and casual.
Some of them think its safe, others think the risk is overblown, and a lot just don't want to deal with their kid having a shit fit.
In the UK, unless you are adopting a kid with needs, you will not get any parenting training. so you're on your own on how to deal with children. TV was safe when I was a kid, and younger parents who grew up with digital TV also had safe watching, why would youtube kids be any different?
With my kids (and yes this is a boast, I'm middle class, this is how we assert dominance) I was lucky enough to be able to enforce time limits of TV/netflix etc. They also aren't allowed youtube on their own, so never got onto the conversion ladder from crap to exploitative crap.
crucially they don't have tablets/phones whilst bored. TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
> TV was safe when I was a kid,
Safe in some ways, but still harmful. it was passive and a substitute for things that helped you develop. A lot of parents (mine included) limited TV for just this reason.
> TV is a treat, so boredom requires them to sit there and fucking day dream like the rest of us.
Exactly this - one of the things I had in mind with regard to TV being harmful. Even in the days when we had three or four broadcast channels and that was it!
> I'm middle class
Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
This is a change that has accelerated in the last 25 years, and we do all need to do something about it. I suspect the first step is making housing mor affordable, which means building more homes. (both "private" and social, [council housing] we can't just cater to one part of the market.)
> Worth noting that the British and American definitions of middle class are quite different.
hooooboy yes.
If shitty parent's don't care about well-being of their children, they could at least consider the cost of future medication, not to even mention likely worse performance in school and job market.
ADHD is an executive functioning disorder with mainly genetic causes, it is not something that you can parent a kid out of, or in to.
With lifestyle changes to you can manage it, or make it worse. But you don't cause it, or prevent it from happening from letting kids use tablets.
There is also something called "Attention Deficit Trait", which is case of ADHD like symptoms where the cause is not in genetics, but solely in environmental factors. While real ADHD is largely in genetics, I fully believe any individual can mess up their dopamine system by spending enough time browsing social media on their smartphone.
Most people who get ADHD diagnosis do have the condition (assuming proper diagnosis procedures were followed), but in a different environment it could probably be much less of an issue for many.
Has the extra benefit of getting them ready for the workforce. /s
PS to parents: give you child a toy or a book not a tablet ffs.
Not all devices are equally bad.
I've been happily learning to code my own video games on Intel 486 PC in QuickBasic since late elementary school (age 10), and yes, I played outdoors with other kids too.
Before I had PC of my own, I was making them on paper (game design and mechanics, not literal code).
Yeah sometimes you want your kid to not scream the whole time in the car or on a 6 hour flight where everyone will hate you. My 4 year old niece once screamed for the entirety of a 30 minute car ride because she didn't like what color socks she was wearing, you can't talk yourself out of these absurd situations sometimes and distractions help. I'd love to give a book in these situations, but half the time it just gets thrown at your head.
Why does no one say "parents need more time and space" or "parents need help making effective choices in a world that constantly demands more of them" everyone loves crawling out of the woodwork to tell you how horrible you are.
kids also roamed on their own quite a lot more with other kids
The dual-income household expectation and collapsing middle-class (lost share of productivity) would be the most to blame from my perspective... there's also a major daycare shortage because of this, the lifestyle changed and surrounding factors haven't caught up. There are kids regularly staying at after school programs until 6pm because parents are working and no one wants kids wandering around on their own, even in teen years. My local mall has banned kids under 18 unsupervised as yet another example.
If a kid made a scene in public back in 1950, they would be smacked. In fact, in many countries in the world, people are still pro-smacking. Teachers can smack the kids with no moral issue.
Mental health for kids before 2000 was much worse... to be generous to the older generations.
It's a non-issue. Toddlers/kids maybe fly once a month max. Using tablets during that time is negligible.
That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life - the kid has to learn that sometimes shit's not gonna go their way and they have to figure out how to get over it. I'll be damned if I'm gonna teach them that the way they can calm themselves down and regulate their emotions is by the sweet, sweet blue hue of a tablet.
> That drive fucking sucks ass, don't get me wrong, but oh well, that's part of life
Such a great attitude. Wish everyone saw it this way. I've tanked a few car rides like this but I'll do it a hundred more times before I throw a pacifier at my kids.
An almost verbatim line from Toy Story. Incredible. Only the main character was quite a bit older than 3.
https://www.teaching.com.au/product/rechargeable-bee-bot
These were a rite of passage here in Australia for any kid who showed an interest in maths or computers.
I would have loved this as a kid!
Nobody here intends to have an actual conversation including you.
Many medications behave extremely differently under different dosages, delivery methods and variants.
To quote an ex of mine who was a school psychiatrist, "oh, ADHD meds are addictive are they? I wish someone would tell that to my kids who keep on forgetting to take them."
I recently watched Toy Story 5 on a long flight. I almost felt it should come with a trigger warning - I thought it was a spot on, brilliant yet inherently depressing commentary on on current relationship with tech.
(Minor spoiler alert) One of my favorite scenes was when a slew of toys were running through a house with a family inside. Normally in the Toy Story world when a human see the toys they need to "play dead", but since all the humans were glued to their screens they could run by unimpeded.
To a kid, playing games from the 1980s off a floppy disk is not a significantly difficult experience than using the very latest technology, but I suspect the former is far better for their developing brains.
Meanwhile, you can get them to learn how to type on the keyboard and learn the basics of needing to type in commands to make the computer do something, which is a lifelong skill - tapping icons on a tablet is not.
... which gets ever more hard to provide, sadly. Many people can't really afford an appropriately sized home - but in contrast to "earlier" times, can't send the kids outdoors as a replacement either as they're unsafe due to car-centric culture, the death of third spaces and, in the US, gun and other violence.
I 3D printed a film development tank, and bought some "glassware" at a thrift shop to mix things up.
You still technically need a real fixer, but B&W fixer isn't all that bad compared to the whole slew of chemicals needed for color processing. The only thing I've bought for the whole process was some powdered fixer from a photo store.
Here's some of the shots off my first roll (Ilford HP5 shot on an Olympus Pen EE2) https://postimg.cc/gallery/fL5HvXV this was just using a film scanning phone app, but I've since gotten a real film scanner which gives much better contrast, I just don't have any of those on my work computer.
I can't help with the film costs, though...
but thing is, it was not a whole PC. it was just the keyboard...
i played with that keyboard for 1 year before my family could afford to buy the rest of the PC.
in that year i learned the position of every key and would show off to friends how i can find any key, with my eyes closed.
This was before computers were common.
A pre-millennial computing experience would have the benefit of not having that sort of bullshit. For the patience-building experience it could be real floppies, but putting the games in an emulator is also an option. I guess Windows 11's "Install Copilot Edge OneDrive 365? [Yes/Maybe later]" popups means you'll have to go Linux...
It was easier with the older one as phones and tablets were not as pervasive so I can understand it has become harder to do.
I also think another thing that benefitted them greatly was that we did not have a TV ( https://pietersz.co.uk/2008/05/i-have-no-tv/ )
I also thing another issue is that parents are also addicted to devices so pay less attention to children. its not the only issue, but it makes it worse. It was epitomised for me by a woman who, when her son refused to put down his tablet on a train trip, took a photo of him on it and posted it to FB for advice.
The Amazon product is fine. It's really a question of how often they use it, and how early. I agree that any screens before 2 risks screwing up a human's idea of what's real.
Kids don't fucking know the difference you dirty fucks.
Amazon going full Facebook-at-their-worst. Nice to know.
I'm going off on a big tangent here, but hear me out (or ignore me entirely because there's political content, but in a practical context - I think). Humans don't need much of an excuse to reach for an easy answer, and parenting on its own is probably one of the most difficult undertakings in the human experience. "Modern life" is becoming increasingly complex to navigate, we are bombarded with attention sucking ... everything, giving us the sense that time is so scarce that the easiest, most immediate answer is the only option. This is being made true as much for parenting - give them the electronic device - as it is for work problems - MVP, band-aid, temporary becomes permanent.
Amazon product and marketing is an accelerant of this. Encouragement of the ever decreasing time frame of what is already ridiculous short-termism. Amazon are obviously not alone in this, but neither are they working against it or wanting to leave any possible addiction-money profit on the table. This is one of the reasons I'm obsessed with blocking advertising. The more they can convince you of the importance of "all the things" the more of their things you need to buy to create more time for yourself - at the expense of your child. Nice, Jeff. Nice.
On the quality of parenting: My children's grandparents, on both sides of the family, have been a great help. I guess we've been lucky in having them available, but also (maybe accidentally) smart in not moving away from the local support network of family in order to pursue better/bigger/higher-income careers. Where this relates to the above is that, the pace of life, in combination with having children, almost requires a family support network, more specifically grandparents since they're likely retired or in the twilight of their careers and therefore have more time flexibility. Something that's become increasingly obvious to me is the 'life' advantage bestowed upon those with a local family support network over those who do not. This is something that often puts migrants well behind locals where my anecdotal-only example is someone I used to work with who had three kids but no extended family, and therefore school drop-offs, pick-ups, doctor's appointments and all the other general activities and emergencies that go with having kids is spread out over two people (mum and dad) rather than a full extended family network.
The point I'm trying to make is that this marketing of electronic pacifiers to parents is a symptom of the (unsustainable) increasing 'urgency' of the pace of modern life, which can be made manageable with a decent extended family support network. The advantages of which are compounding.
Something I heard that really stuck with me was: Children form most of their behavioural patterns by the age of three (or maybe it was 5), and so those early years are the most important in shaping them. It requires less work to get something right the first time, than having to fix something that's broken. This isn't to say things can go wrong, but what it means is to do your best for those years to have a chance at being able to reclaim more of yourself at a later stage.
Ultimately, if you "just give them the tablet" now, you'll be "just giving them the tablet" for the rest of your life.
/ridiculously tangential rant (just had to get some of the thoughts written down to see how they turned out)
And they have them, like cheap Lenovos and whatnot.
So I'm allowed to complain, and then some :). Screens are horrible. But kids don't raise themselves no matter how "easy" they are. The parents have to make unpopular decisions that the kids will benefit from and maybe even understand when they're older. Those decisions will suck the life out of you because the child "hates" you for it, and you have to fill the void with something else that takes more parental effort. Sometimes maybe it's impossible to avoid "the screen" because of some special family situation. But at "3+" these are exceptional situations, not the rule, don't treat them like the baseline.
The consequences of addiction from such a young age to screens (or sugar, junk food and every other mistake parents make to make their lives easier in the moment) are documented and lifelong. As a parent you won't escape them, you'll live them through your child's life. Might as well take the hit for them now, even if it costs you.
We've had an absolutely-zero-screens policy for our almost-3-year-old (and will have the same for his baby sister) and I think it's made things much easier than if he had limited access. It's simply Not An Option, so we as parents and he as a child manage to find other interesting things to do. Currently he's really into listening to music on a 35-year-old Fisher Price cassette player, scooting a toy garbage truck around, and thumbing through books.
Plane rides are difficult (and he's had many) but so far we have gotten through them with patience, lots of snacks, and a new toy or two.
Yeah sometimes this turns into an emotional outburst. So what? She's a toddler sometimes the emotional outburst just happens because the sofa looked at her wrong.
It seems to make the special cases where she is allowed the screen for longer (long car/van rides for example) work better.
Tolerance of tablet use is a spectrum ranging from the aggressively Luddite tech elite shielding their children from their own creation all the way to the 6-year-old posted up in the basin of a grocery cart dual-wielding their ruggedized tablet running Minecraft and their parents’ phone cycling through YouTube slop.
In my experience, most people fall somewhere in the middle, i.e. “we’re on our 4th hour in coach class, I’m tired of pretending this animal-themed card game is fun, and I know this isn’t development-maxing right now but we’re gonna do it for an hour to preserve our sanity and that of those around us”.
That being said, the problem with these ads is that they normalize tablet use as something that’s just another (even desirable!) part of everyday life, not a tool of last resort.
Some of the kids in my neighborhood derisively called another kid a "tablet kid" because he'd rather stay inside on his tablet than go outside in the summer and play.
Personally, tablet time is reserved for airplanes and trains. We also have a color eink android tablet that is hooked up to Libby and isn't used for anything else but reading.
TV screen time is limited to watching shows together with one of us, or when my son is sick.
Video/computer games are always played together.
Same goes for movies, movies are always co-watched, we sit through the movie, pause and discuss what is going on, I'll ask about why people are doing certain things, what emotions different characters are having in a scene, and so forth.
Christ, at least let the kid think about it on his own and ask questions later! Don't know about your kid, but I don't know ANY person, at any age, that would not feel like they're enduring an insufferable school class with behaviour like this.
Depends on the age of the kid. Started doing this when my son was 3, it helped him learn lots of words for different emotions and it helped him learn to use words to describe other's emotions.
Now that he is older I do this less, it depends on what we are watching though.
Active listening to stories, and actively engaging with media, is a learned skill. It isn't automatic.
I read to him together, a lot, and he'll stop and ask me questions about what is happening in the book. When I'm reading to him and other kids at the same time, other kids will notice him asking questions and then realize they can also ask questions, and pretty soon I am answering more and more questions about what is going on.
"centering around the ambitious billionaire Isaac Flint who conceives a nefarious plan to monopolize the Earth's air supply. "